I actually had someone try to sell me this shit

From wikipedia:


Left-wing past of neoconservatives

Former neoconservative author Michael Lind argues that "The organization as well as the ideology of the neoconservative movement has left-liberal origins." He draws a line from the center-left anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom to the Committee on the Present Danger to the Project for the New American Century and adds that "European social-democratic models inspired the quintessential neocon institution, the National Endowment for Democracy." Some neoconservatives were anti-Vietnam War.[citation needed]

The neoconservative desire to spread democracy abroad has been likened to the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. Lind argues that the neoconservatives are influenced by the thought of former Trotskyists such as James Burnham and Max Shachtman, who argued that "the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois 'new class.'" He sees the neoconservative concept of "global democratic revolution" as deriving from the Trotskyist Fourth International's "vision of permanent revolution." He also points to what he sees as the Marxist origin of "the economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism," which he describes as "Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic subjects of history." However, few leading neoconservatives cite James Burnham as a major influence.[13]

Critics of Lind contend that there is no theoretical connection between Trotsky's "permanent revolution," and that the idea of a "global democratic revolution" instead has Wilsonian roots.[14] While both Wilsonianism and the theory of permanent revolution have been proposed as strategies for underdeveloped parts of the world, Wilson proposed capitalist solutions, while Trotsky advocated socialist solutions.

http://www.chamberofhorrors.com/Merchant2/ta241.jpg

http://www.jeffreyscottholland.com/grilloham.jpg

I actually had someone try to sell me this shit

From wikipedia:


Left-wing past of neoconservatives

Former neoconservative author Michael Lind argues that "The organization as well as the ideology of the neoconservative movement has left-liberal origins." He draws a line from the center-left anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom to the Committee on the Present Danger to the Project for the New American Century and adds that "European social-democratic models inspired the quintessential neocon institution, the National Endowment for Democracy." Some neoconservatives were anti-Vietnam War.[citation needed]

The neoconservative desire to spread democracy abroad has been likened to the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. Lind argues that the neoconservatives are influenced by the thought of former Trotskyists such as James Burnham and Max Shachtman, who argued that "the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois 'new class.'" He sees the neoconservative concept of "global democratic revolution" as deriving from the Trotskyist Fourth International's "vision of permanent revolution." He also points to what he sees as the Marxist origin of "the economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism," which he describes as "Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic subjects of history." However, few leading neoconservatives cite James Burnham as a major influence.[13]

Critics of Lind contend that there is no theoretical connection between Trotsky's "permanent revolution," and that the idea of a "global democratic revolution" instead has Wilsonian roots.[14] While both Wilsonianism and the theory of permanent revolution have been proposed as strategies for underdeveloped parts of the world, Wilson proposed capitalist solutions, while Trotsky advocated socialist solutions.


This is 100% true... Every word of it. Rothbard railed at the "Trotskyites", with their "Marxist-Leninist training" and "organizational discipline", displacing the Libertarian right with newfound neo-con zealotry. And, it is end to end... from Podhoritz to Hitchens to Perle to Kristol to Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Funny, eh? ...the socialist poseurs of Libertarianism complaining about the socialist sell-outs of Neo-conservatism.

Ain't the first time, either. The bulk of the 50s and 60s McCarthyites were lapsed Socialists...

Like the French Foreign Legion, Commie training is pretty good for future mercs...

http://www.kepi.cncplusplus.com/images/IvoryCoast/IC_arrival_03.jpg

This is 100% true... Every word of it. Rothbard railed at the "Trotskyites", with their "Marxist-Leninist training" and "organizational discipline", displacing the Libertarian right with newfound neo-con zealotry. And, it is end to end... from Podhoritz to Hitchens to Perle to Kristol to Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Funny, eh? ...the socialist poseurs of Libertarianism complaining about the socialist sell-outs of Neo-conservatism.

Ain't the first time, either. The bulk of the 50s and 60s McCarthyites were lapsed Socialists...

Like the French Foreign Legion, Commie training is pretty good for future mercs...

Yup Yup. I knew that was true, but those are some new details. Of course you leave out the important part tho - that they are all Pussies who Gave Up their ideology because will to power mattered more and they needed something expedient. Lies work.

COMMENT: Just because Paul Berman claims that CLR James was an influence, there is no reason to take him at his word. By the same token, George W. Bush claims that Jesus Christ influences his policies, when any sensible person understands that the White House owes much more to Joseph Goebbels. Berman is a rigid anti-Communist. During the 1980s he used his Village Voice bully pulpit to castigate the Sandinista government in terms similar to Oliver North. CLR James was a revolutionary; Paul Berman was and is a liberal no matter who he mistakenly thinks "influenced" him. In fact, his latest book simply puts forward his liberal prejudices in unambiguous terms as the title suggests: "Terror and Liberalism" (he is for liberalism).



JEET HEER: To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as "the old man" and "L.D." (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein). "To a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of L.D," he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman.



"I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this," Schwartz notes. "We had this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never part of it. He's definitely aware." The yoking together of Paul Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.



COMMENT: I would not take anything that Schwartz says seriously. There is not a single political or religious sect that he has not dipped his big toe in, from Trotskyism, anarchism, and "libertarian socialism" on the left, to Buckleyite conservatism on the right. He is now a devout Sufi Muslim, a faith that he discovered in the Balkans while writing pleas on behalf of imperialist intervention. The old Jewish saying would apply to Schwartz: "A chazer bleibt a chazer." (A pig remains a pig.)



JEET HEER: To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S. expansionism, it is important to know something about Max Shachtman, Trotsky's controversial American disciple. Shachtman's career provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon.



COMMENT: The rest of Heer's article spells out the connections between people like Paul Berman and Max Shachtman, which of course has more than a grain of truth. But this has less to do with Shachtman's connections to Trotsky than his *break* with Trotsky. In a very real sense, Shachtman is the spiritual and ideological father not only to those who spent 30 seconds in the Trotskyist movement, but to Michael Berubé, Todd Gitlin, Eric Alterman, Leo Casey, Stanley Aronowitz, and dozens of other 1960s and 70s radicals and left-liberals who have learned to worship the American flag since 9/11. But then again, the blame might not be put totally on Shachtman's shoulders. It would probably make sense to connect the Cruise Missile left to its true progenitors, namely the trade union bureaucrats, intelligentsia and parliamentarians of the Second International who backed their own bourgeoisie in WWI. Of course, Lenin and Trotsky broke with these traitors back in 1914 and Trotsky himself never betrayed his own principles until his death. In his fight with Max Shachtman and James Burnham over how to characterize the USSR after the Stalin-Hitler pact, Trotsky was faced with the same kind of liberal prejudices and inability to think in class terms that was on display when a large swath of the left, including some "Marxists" cheered on NATO's war against the Serbs. His words seem as timely as ever:



"It is necessary to call things by their right names. Now that the positions of both factions in the struggle have become determined with complete clearness, it must be said that the minority of the National Committee is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency. Like any petty-bourgeois group inside the socialist movement, the present opposition is characterized by the following features: a disdainful attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect for the tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal "independence" at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position to another…"

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/am ... etHeer.htm (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/JeetHeer.htm)

http://a4.vox.com/6a00cd97061c554cd500d4141daabc6a47.jpg




Neoconservatives and Trotskyism

By Bill King
web posted March 22, 2004

In one of the first in-depth studies written about neoconservatism in the 1970s, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics (1978), Peter Steinfels observed that it is impossible to understand the neoconservatives without understanding their history. Yet it is precisely the history of "the neocons" that is today being systematically distorted by paleoconservatives through the polemical campaign they are waging against leading neoconservative intellectuals and the foreign policy of the Bush administration.

Trotsky

As part of the two-decade old civil war within intellectual conservatism, paleoconservatives have forcefully asserted that neoconservatism is a descendant of American Trotskyism, and that neoconservatives continue to be influenced by the ideas of the exiled Soviet revolutionary in their view of foreign policy. In fact, in the period since the attacks of 9/11 the isolationist paleocons have made the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion one of their main weapons in the ongoing feud. Web sites such as The Center for Libertarian Studies' LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com, and magazines such as Pat Buchanan's American Conservative and the Rockford Institute's Chronicles, have all featured articles focusing on the supposed link between the neocons and Leon Trotsky. The most extreme paleocons, who flirt dangerously with outright anti-Semitism, claim not only that neoconservatism is derivative of Trotskyism but that a "cabal of Jewish neocons" is manipulating US foreign policy and actually implementing Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution from the White House.

While paleoconservatives usually have little impact outside of intellectual circles, their "Trotskyist neocon" assertion has rapidly entered mainstream political discussion. To a large degree this is due to the efforts of anti-neocon liberal pundits, such as Michael Lind and William Pfaff, who popularized the neoconservative-as-Trotskyist theme both before and during the initial ground war in Iraq. The assertion is now so widely accepted that a writer as far removed from paleoconservatism (or anti-neocon liberalism) as Vanity Fair's Sam Tanenhaus can claim that, "…a belated species of Trotskyism has at last established itself in the White House." [1] Ostensibly serious discussions of neoconservative "Trotskyism" have also appeared in mainstream newspapers throughout the world, from Canada's National Post to Hong Kong's Asia Times Online. [2] And even as respected a foreign policy commentator as Dimitri K. Simes, co-publisher of The National Interest, has joined the "Trotskyist neocon" chorus, writing recently in Foreign Affairs that the neoconservatives' belief in "permanent worldwide revolution" owes more to the founder of the Bolshevik Red Army than to "America's forefathers". [3]

But despite its current popularity, the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion contributes nothing to our understanding of the origins, or nature, of neoconservatism. In fact quite the opposite. While it is based on elements of truth, the assertion for the most part consists of exaggerations, misrepresentations,

<snip>

Permanent Confusion

The final variation of the "Trotskyist neocon" assertion is the one that received much attention during the debates over the war in Iraq, and which contributed the most to the assertion's current widespread popularity. It is also perhaps the most confused. The contention here, as ludicrous as it may seem, is that neoconservatives in the US Defense Department, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, are surreptitiously implementing Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution from the White House. [23]

This charge is associated primarily with the liberal pundit Michael Lind, who in a much quoted article in the New Statesman from April of this year wrote that, "…neoconservative defence [sic] intellectuals…call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism' (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism". [24] Even before Lind, however, the charge had already been made by Paris-based columnist William Pfaff, who had written in the International Herald Tribune in December of 2002 that, "The Bush administration's determination to deal with its problems through military means [….] seems a rightist version of Trotsky's "permanent revolution," destroying existing institutions and structures in the millenarian expectation that all this violence will come to an end in a better and happier world." [25] As recently as this past August, Pfaff was still insisting in the IHT that neoconservatives, "…are influenced by the Trotskyist version of Marxist millenarianism that was the intellectual seedbed of the neoconservative movement." [26]

Yet if anti-neocon liberals such as Lind and Pfaff -- together with an assortment of conspiracy theorists [27] -- have done the most to popularize the idea that neoconservatives adhere to the theory of permanent revolution, it is again the paleoconservatives that deserve the credit for coining the idea -- or at least some of the credit, for the actual origins are more varied than one would imagine. Paleoconservative criticism of the aggressive internationalism championed by some neoconservatives dates back to the origins of their dispute in the early 1980s. But at that time, neoconservatives were only being accused of "neo-Wilsonianism". Explicitly equating the belief in promoting a "global democratic revolution" with Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is a much more recent invention that started during the debates over how to respond to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 -- and it has some rather surprising roots.

In September of 2001, just a few weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the paleoconservative author Joseph Stromberg devoted an article on the LewRockwell.com web site to attacking a piece by neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen entitled "Creative Destruction: How to wage a revolutionary war". Ledeen's main argument was that it was "…time once again to export the democratic revolution" as the best way to defeat the terrorists. [28] Polemicizing against this view, Stromberg questioned whether Ledeen's approach stemmed from "Schumpeter or Bakunin" and decided it was neither. Stromberg then quoted a Yugoslav bureaucrat from the 1960s, Edvard Kardelj, who at the height of the Soviet-Chinese dispute sought to discredit the "Chinese line of exporting the revolution by force" by labeling it as "Trotskyite". Stromberg, who at least gives credit to Commissar Kardelj, then went on to -- incredibly -- choose that very same label to smear Ledeen and the neoconservatives. Given these methods, one should perhaps refer to the paleocons as the "inverted Titoists" of conservatism!

In reality, while Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution can be called many things, including irrelevant, it has nothing whatsoever to do with exporting revolution. Much less does it extol upheaval for its own sake or the inherent virtues of violence and destruction -- something more akin to a blend of Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon than to Trotskyism. As defined in its final form by Trotsky in the late 1920s, the theory of permanent revolution held that in third world countries, attempts to carry out the tasks of the "bourgeois-democratic" revolution, such as land reform and "authentic" national independence, would fail unless those attempts led to the seizure of power by the working class through a socialist revolution. [29] Rather than a theory of "exporting revolution", Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is above all a theory of the possibility of socialist revolution in the third world through combining and passing over the "historical stage" of a "bourgeois-democratic" revolution.

The claim that neoconservatives derive their view of foreign policy from an inversion of the American Trotskyists' call for permanent revolution in the 1930s and 40s is thus deeply flawed right from the start: Permanent revolution was never about using the Red Army to spread socialism. The Trotskyist movement's actual conceptual framework and political activity in the 1930s and early 40s consisted of trying to bring about world-wide revolutions "from below" as the way to break the Soviet Union out of its isolation and achieve world socialism. Calling for the Stalinist bureaucracy to export socialism by bayonet would not only have had nothing to do with permanent revolution, it would have been suicidal to boot! [30] It was, after all, that same Stalinist bureaucracy that the Trotskyists were seeking to overthrow through "political revolution" in the USSR, and which was itself actively strangling revolutions and annihilating Trotskyists wherever it could, from Siberia to Spain to Vietnam.

Even if one were to accept, for the purpose of example, that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was based on an idealist internationalism that called for the military expansion of the USSR, the anti-neocons would still be mistaken in their claim that there is a single neoconservative approach to foreign policy that emerged as an inversion of this theory. One need only note that Irving Kristol, the supposed "arch-Trotskyist" according to the paleocons, has never adhered to an internationalist or "crusading" view of international relations. Kristol has instead argued for a "global unilateralism", a hybrid view based on the criteria of American national interest, something which situates him closer to foreign policy realism than to an idealist focus on "global democratic revolution". [31] As John Judis himself pointed out in an earlier, more measured article, even James Burnham, often considered a forerunner to the neoconservatives, viewed American foreign policy, "…not in terms of a Wilsonian quest for global democracy, but in terms of American national interest." [32] And Burnham was once a leader of the American Trotskyists.

On the other hand, Joshua Muravchik, one of today's leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals, who does indeed argue for a "democratic internationalism", is not now nor has he ever been a "Trotskyite", "Shachtmanite", or a supporter of any of Trotsky's theories -- least of all his theory of third world revolution. The same applies to all the other second generation neoconservatives both in and out of the White House such as Ledeen, Wolfowitz, Perle, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and former director of the CIA, James Woolsey. Beyond just a massive misreading of Trotsky, it is simply a lack of common sense to maintain that today's neoconservatives, all leading figures in the most powerful capitalist democracy in the history of the world, have been in any way influenced by a theory whose staunchest partisans have included insurgent Bolivian miners in the 1950s, Peruvian peasant militias in the 1960s, urban guerrillas in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s, and which today still has adherents among the many rabidly anti-American academics that can be found on university campuses throughout the world.

http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/ ... trotp2.htm (http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0304/0304neocontrotp2.htm)

http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0304/032204wolfowitzpaul.jpg

This is 100% true... Every word of it. Rothbard railed at the "Trotskyites", with their "Marxist-Leninist training" and "organizational discipline", displacing the Libertarian right with newfound neo-con zealotry. And, it is end to end... from Podhoritz to Hitchens to Perle to Kristol to Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Funny, eh? ...the socialist poseurs of Libertarianism complaining about the socialist sell-outs of Neo-conservatism.

Ain't the first time, either. The bulk of the 50s and 60s McCarthyites were lapsed Socialists...

Like the French Foreign Legion, Commie training is pretty good for future mercs...

Yup Yup. I knew that was true, but those are some new details. Of course you leave out the important part tho - that they are all Pussies who Gave Up their ideology because will to power mattered more and they needed something expedient. Lies work.

No, Nietzsche has nothing to do with IMO. He's totally bogus anyway. Almost as much a caricature as "truth, justice, and the American Way"

http://www.supermantv.net/superman/george_reeves/Superman_Vs_The_Professor.jpg

The point I was going for was the insinuation that neoconservatism is a socialist ideology or at least an extension of socialism. The fact that some of its major progenitors (Strauss, Kirkpatrick, and as Chlamor mentions Schactman) had socialist beginnings doesn't really get that claim past the laugh test.

JEET HEER: To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as "the old man" and "L.D." (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein). "To a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of L.D," he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman.



"I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this," Schwartz notes. "We had this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never part of it. He's definitely aware." The yoking together of Paul Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.


This is a really, really odd defense. I don't think anybody was saying that the neo-cons are Trotskyists now and I think any Imperialist who has a Nazi version of the theory of "Permanent Revolution" is completely bonkers (whether it's right or wrong, it's not their theory).

"Trotsky was not a neocon..."

OK, I buy that.
.